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We have an elite completely devoid of virtue and with an inverted sense of noblesse oblige. Why should people feel any loyalty to an elite which is completely contemptible in their behaviour? The current billionaire class manage to make the corrupt people of Versailles seem virtuous.
The current elite needs to either shape up or get replaced.
And how do you propose, exactly, to replace them, should they not "shape up"?
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There should be no noblesse oblige without the patents of nobility.
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TAPS SIGN EAGERLY
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What exactly would the noblesse oblige be that the elite could exhibit that would satisfy the the hoi polloi? Massive public works projects? Donating ever increasing shares of their wealth to broken nonprofits that do nothing of value? Art museums? Wives who volunteer in soup kitchens?
In Chicago, Al Capone was popular among the working class because he ran soup kitchens.
An assurance that you won't starve to death in a ditch seems like a pretty good baseline.
The top 1% of income earned pay 40% of income tax which goes to fund Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and EBT. I doubt that Al Capone spent as much of his income on soup kitchens as top 1% income earners spend on those things. Yet this is not enough.
High income != high wealth. High income people are for the most part the upper middle class. They are the loyal retainers of the true ownership class. The truely rich don’t pay much in taxes.
It's intuitively bizarre to say that people who out-earn 99% of people are part of the middle class. Data bears out our intuitions - half of the top 1% of wealth holders are in the top 1% by income, with the rest of the top 1% of income earners being made of the next 9% of wealth holders. You're welcome to define the top 10% of the country as the "upper middle class" but this is pretty nonsensical.
Maybe “upper middle class” isn’t the right term for them, especially at the higher end, but the fact remains that anyone whose wealth is primarily drawn from their own labor is just not in the same category as people who derive their wealth from owning. There are a few exceptions like CEOs who manage established companies rather than founding, but for the most part the people paying the very high income taxes are not the super wealthy. When the super wealthy do pay high income taxes, it’s generally pretty trivial compared with the main bulk of their wealth. If you don’t want to call top earners who can save low double digit millions “upper middle class,” that’s fine, but it is import to distinguish them from billionaires and centimillionares.
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One difference is that the government intermediates the creation of value and the distribution of value. Humans evolved for personalist politics; tracking where the revenues come from that the government redistributes is beyond the majority of people. Instead, if something the government is doing helps you out, it's because of the Big Man (be it Obama or Trump), not the material organization of the economy.
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Is the fix, then, to replace government spending $100k/year per person on homeless services with soup kitchens personally funded by AI oligarchs serving slop costing $100/year, with a big statue of Altman up front?
There is no one in San Francisco starving to death for lack of resources.
Honestly, maybe?
When Capone was running his soup kitchens, publicly funded relief systems didn't really exist like they did today. He took the floor from "nothing" to "something".
It seems like we need more stops on the way down between "gainfully employed" and "underpass resident". Bringing back SROs, for example, might help. On the government side, we could consider reinstating the civilian conservation corps.
Amazon already has, for most intents and purposes, a guaranteed job paying meager but livable wages for anyone willing to work. They get zero gratitude for this.
I can't imagine why.
As someone who's seen what goes on in shipping/mailing, that's not a job you want to get stuck with.
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A week ago OpenAI published an AI industrial policy document that lists many ideas for how to distribute wealth. Some things it includes are: creation of a public wealth fund that gives all citizens stake in AI-driven growth, increasing the capital-gains and corporate tax rates, and expanding workers benefits as an “efficiency dividend” (including suggestion of a 32 hour work week). They did not have to do this and yet they did. I don’t think actually following through on such an assurance is something any lone company could do, so their duty is to lobby the government to take such action. This is them doing that.
I think I have a fiduciary duty to my investors to recommend the State buys their bags, actually.
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To my knowledge Sam Altman does not possess any of the characteristics you’ve listed here. He consistently states he wants the benefit of the technology his company is developing to be widely distributed and documents of his internal communications with Elon and his co-founders (from their ongoing trial) show that this a sincere concern of his.
No one is asking for loyalty to the elite, I’m asking for “loyalty” (if you want to call it that) to the basic expectation of liberal democracy that you don’t just try to kill people because you disagree with them.
But Altman lies constantly about everything. He started off saying he was running a non-profit, then weaselled out of it. Ilya hates him and accused him of lying. Dario hates him and accused him of lying. Helen Toner accused Altman of failing to inform the board about the ChatGPT launch and hiding his financial interest in the OpenAI Startup Fund.
Even in that very trial it brings out their plans to basically run off with Elon's money and make a for profit.
He might just be saying that because it sounds a lot better than 'this is my path to universal domination, you dumb, dumb fucks'. Deceptive people shouldn't be trusted.
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